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  Sometimes ancestral experiences can be vivid, with complete and very specific details that can be easily verified. At other times, they can be vague and diffuse, revealing only impressions and emotional atmospheres concerning attributes such as the quality of relationships between members of a certain family, tribe, or clan. As a psychiatrist, I have been particularly interested to see how often these ancestral experiences yield insights into personal problems we may be having in the present. I am convinced that these glimpses into the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even more distant relatives, can help us better understand, and often resolve, conflicts in our present lives.

  The following example illustrates the rich and accurate historical information that we can assemble from some ancestral experiences, providing us with valuable insights concerning periods that might otherwise be lost to history. This particular experience is interesting because it was eventually confirmed not only by focused historical research but by an unexpected synchronistic event.

  In systematic LSD therapy, a young woman, whom I will call Renata, being treated for a complex neurosis, experienced many scenes that took place in Prague in the seventeenth century. During that period, which was just before the Thirty Years' War in Europe, Bohemia, part of today's Czechoslovakia, came under the rule of the Habsburg dynasty. In an effort to destroy feelings of national pride, the Habsburgs captured and beheaded twenty-seven members of the Czech nobility in a public execution at the Old Town Square in Prague.

  During her sessions with me, Renata described many images and insights concerning the architecture of the period, typical garments that people were wearing, as well as weapons and utensils used in everyday life. She was able to describe complex relationships between the royal family and the vassals. All these things came to her in great detail and with profound understanding, though she had never studied this historical period. (In validating many of the details she reported, I had to consult scholarly resources.)

  Many of Renata's experiences related particularly to a specific nobleman who was executed by the Habsburgs. In a dramatic sequence, Renata relived the actual details of this man's execution, experienced as if she was inside his body. As a witness to Renata's reliving of this personal drama, I must admit that I shared her bewilderment and confusion. In an effort to understand what was happening, I chose two different approaches. In one, I spent considerable time verifying the historical information she was reporting, and I found an astonishing amount of objective evidence linking her story to this piece of seventeenth-century history. In the other, I applied all my psychoanalytic skills, hoping to uncover any evidence that might suggest that her historical experiences were actually disguised childhood conflicts or emotional struggles in her present life. But try as I might I could not explain her transpersonal experiences from the psychological problems she was harboring.

  Two years after my work with Renata, after I had moved to the United States, I received a long letter from her. She told how she had recently happened to meet her father, whom she had not seen since she was three years old, when her parents divorced. She had dinner with him in his home and afterward he showed her the product of his favorite hobby, which was a genealogical graph tracing the family history back through the centuries. To her amazement, she found that her father and she were descendants of one of the noblemen executed by the Habsburgs that fateful day in the early 1600s. This information only confirmed her previous suspicion, that certain emotionally charged memories can be imprinted in the genetic code and transmitted through the centuries to future generations.

  After overcoming my initial shock I realized there was a flaw in Renata's interpretation. Even if it were true that memories could be passed along through the genetic code, death would naturally cut off the route of transmission that would make this possible. In other words, since the nobleman had been executed he would not have genetically passed along the experience of his death to Renata. Even as I thought about this, I found myself unable to ignore the remarkable correlation between Renata's experiences and her father's genealogical findings. Was all this just an incredible but meaningless coincidence or do such incidents deserve more serious attention?

  I decided that the amazing synchronicity of Renata's experience being followed by her meeting with her father, who then presented her with the genealogical information that seemed to support her experience, could not be written off as an accident. But what could explain these events? Did the information about the nobleman's death reach Renata's psyche through a telepathic connection with her father, whom she did not even know? If so, how could it have been translated from raw genealogical information into vivid experiential sequences that were so rich in historical detail?

  I theorized that it might have been possible for a survivor of the nobleman's family, say a son or a daughter, to have genetically passed this information along to Renata. The witness, in this case, would have had to experience his or her father's execution while in a transpersonal state of "dual unity," sharing the actual emotions and sensations of the executed man from his own vantage point. Or could it be that the universe is, in the final analysis, just a divine play of consciousness where all natural laws are ultimately arbitrary, and where any one of us, at any time, can somehow access any material that ever existed or will exist for anyone, anywhere, unfettered by the illusions of matter, space, and time? One thing seems sure: There are principles at work in the universe that are far beyond the capacities of the human imagination. Certainly there are phenomena whose reality cannot be explained by the belief systems imposed on our culture by Newtonian science.

Racial and collective experiences go a step beyond ancestral memories. Racial experiences can involve people outside one's immediate family or blood line, extending out to any members of the same race. This process can reach beyond racial lines to other racial groups and to collective memories of humanity as a whole. I mentioned earlier that psychiatry traditionally looks upon our psyches as being affected only by what we have experienced first hand, through our physical senses or as a result of our own interpretations of these experiences. However, our observations of hundreds of people who have reported ancestral, racial, and collective experiences support Carl Gustav Jung's assertion that our psyches are also deeply affected by a collective unconscious that gives us access to a vast warehouse of memories encompassing all of human experience from the beginning of time.

  During a holotropic training we conducted in California, a European psychiatrist reported the experience which follows. As you read this description, bear in mind that this woman had absolutely no intellectual knowledge of Native American history. Yet, her experience was strikingly reminiscent of the Cherokee Tear Trail and other events in the lives of American Indians during the Indian Removal Act. Here is what she reported.

Suddenly everything seemed cold, abysmal, and hopeless. I felt an enormous force moving me far beyond the boundaries of my present life, to a remote historical period. My ordinary self seemed to have shrunk to the size of a photon and then temporarily vanished. I became another person—an old, small, and incredibly wrinkled Indian woman with rich braids of greasy hair.

  I saw a vast open plane and on it an assembly of thousands of Indians. They sat in groups or clans, surrounding a circle of their elders, who were calm, determined, and motionless. They expected from their people an answer: if they choose Death or the Journey. Those who had chosen death receded into radially arranged long and low cottages. When the decision process had ended, the elders imparted death on their brothers and sisters using poisoned darts. These accepted it calmly as if it were a sacred fulfillment of their lives. When the last of them had died, the women got up and danced the dance of reconciliation with death; it included sowing and sprouting of kernels. Following this, the men stood up and performed the dance of strength, peace, and reconciliation with death.

  Having completed the rituals described above, those who participated in the dance of reconciliation got up and began to leave. The woman who had this experience said that her "entire being was permeated by sadness and grief for which there are no words." With slow rocking movements, she started chanting, a quiet, monotonous chant that expressed what she was feeling. She continued:

  People experiencing racial and/or collective episodes may find themselves participating in dramatic though usually brief sequences that take place in more or less remote historical periods, cultures, and countries. These are typically associated with specific insights concerning relationships between people, the social structure, religious practices, moral codes, art, and the technology of the historical periods involved. Sometimes we observe complex gestures, postures, and symbolic movements of the person who is having racial or collective experiences. Time and time again, objective observers with a knowledge of the countries or peoples the subject is experiencing will confirm that these movement patterns are appropriate and characteristic of the peoples and times being experienced.

  In both therapy and workshop sessions, we have seen people assume complex postures (
asanas
) and gestures (
mudras
) from ancient Yogic traditions even though they have had no prior knowledge or experience with this spiritual practice. In many instances, people experienced themselves participating in practices belonging to cultures that were, in their ordinary states of consciousness, completely unknown to them. With no previous knowledge or training they engaged in movements characteristic of the! Kung Bushman trance dance, the whirling of the dervishes from the Sufi tradition, ritual dances performed in Java or Bali, and symbolic gestures of the Indian Kathakali that express themes from Hindu mythology, as they are performed along the Malabar coast.

  On occasion, people experiencing other lives speak in languages—sometimes obscure, archaic ones—of which they have no knowledge in their ordinary lives. In some instances, the authenticity of the languages used has been confirmed through audio recordings made of sessions where this phenomenon occurred. In other cases, the vocal performances had all the elements of a language, but we were unable to decipher what was being said. This does not necessarily mean that the vocal production was not an authentic language of some ethnic group. Linguists agree that it is extremely difficult to identify all of the thousands of languages and dialects spoken on this planet. However, the fact that we have been able to positively confirm a large number of such instances dispels doubt about the authenticity of this phenomenon. Occasionally, however, the sounds are quite clearly inarticulate gibberish or what is known in certain groups as "speaking in tongues."

  Ancestral and racial experiences often bring deeper insight into the symbolic meanings of cultural practices, even when the people involved had no previous interest or knowledge of them. Our follow-up research to verify the accuracy of such experiences has time and again shown them to be accurate, though they often involve information that would be available only to scholars and other committed specialists.

  I have witnessed, for example, a person who had no background whatsoever in ancient cultures describe details of Egyptian funeral practices, based on his vivid past life experiences. He has passed along, in great detail, information such as the esoteric meaning and form of special amulets and sepulchral boxes, the meaning of the colors chosen for funeral cones, the technology of embalmment, and the purpose of specific ritualized practices. Having experienced himself as an embalmer in ancient Egypt, he was able to describe the size and quality of the mummy bandages, materials used in preparing the mummy cloth, and the shape and symbolism of the four Canopic jars used to hold specific organs taken from the body. Our followup research revealed that details he had reported about the symbolic figures on each jar, as well as the specific contents of each, were found to be accurate, though this was not knowledge that was generally available to the public.

 For most of us born and raised in the Western European traditions, the notion of past lives and karma seems alien, if not bizarre and childish. However it is difficult to overlook the fact that for thousands of years religious writings from a great many societies have discussed past lives, reincarnation, and karma and have described the impact of these on our present lives. From the viewpoint of these writings, none of us comes into life with a "clean slate." Rather our present lives are part of a continuum that can extend far back into many previous lifetimes, and will most likely extend forward into many more. In non-ordinary states of consciousness memories of past lives are woven into a tapestry of experience that includes present life memories around birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

  We are well aware that contemporary Christianity and traditional science denounce or even ridicule such beliefs. However, research in transpersonal psychology continues to provide ample evidence that this area of study is a veritable treasure trove of insights into the nature of the human psyche. So convincing is the evidence in favor of past life influences that one can only conclude that those who refuse to consider this to be an area worthy of serious study must be either uninformed or excessively narrowminded.